Langevin's Train-the-Trainer Blog

It continues to amaze me to hear about the number of companies and organizations who are still doing chalk and talks, data dumps, and death-by-power-point presentations, and calling them training. At Langevin, we teach that presentation alone is not training. A solid training program should contain a basic foundation of Presentation, Application, and Feedback, also known as PAF.

So, you’ve been promoted to the position of training manager. Clearly someone has seen the spark of leadership in you. How exciting! Although leadership is difficult to define, I’ve seen many interpretations. These are some of my favorites:

It’s 3:00 pm on a Friday and the training manager calls you to his/her office with the news…we need you to teach this new course on Monday. What? Well, the good news is you have the weekend to prepare but the bad news is you have the weekend to prepare! Can you relate? Talk about NOT being set up for success. Unfortunately, this is a reality in many corporations and certainly not ideal.

Training managers, a heavy training schedule with several weeks of classroom instruction in a row can take a toll on an instructor. Combine this with travel and administrative duties and an instructor can be at risk of burning out.

I often ask my workshop participants, “What three groups of people must work together for training to be successful?” They always know the answer – managers, trainers, and employees. In this blog I will talk about how managers can either help training succeed or lead to its downfall. In future blogs I will look at how trainers and employees can contribute to training success in your organization.

My wife and I recently gave up city living and bought a farm. Fourteen acres of grapes, a big farm house and a huge barn, all in a beautiful country setting. We knew it was going to be an adjustment in our life style, but we really had no idea how much. The grape vines need a bit of work after some years of harsh winter weather and unfriendly bugs. We had to make some decisions about some of our varieties; do we prune, tie, fertilize, and nurture these plants back to health or do we pull them up and replant?

Many training departments are expanding their role to include performance consulting. Some trainers are even referring to themselves as performance consultants. Now, right off the top, let’s address the negative connotation associated with the term “consultant.” I’m sure you’ve heard it before—a consultant will borrow your watch, tell you what time it is, AND charge by the hour!

As a training manager, have you ever had an instructor who didn’t “cut the mustard?” Maybe the instructor’s evaluations were a bit lower than other instructors, or you heard a critical comment from some of the participants or from a manager? What to do, what to do? You want to be fair to your employee, and if s/he is also an instructor who has subject-matter expertise in some of the offerings in your syllabus, you know they will be hard to replace.

I hear it all the time…"Why can’t managers be more involved in training?” “How can we get their buy-in?” “How else will learners apply what they’ve learned back on the job?”

It’s probably one of our biggest challenges. And let’s face it…if learners don’t use it, they lose it. Even worse, as trainers, we have accomplished nothing when this happens. It doesn’t matter how well the course has been designed or delivered. It’s about improving performanceback on the job!

I once read that the most rewarding, yet most challenging, part of a manager’s job is managing people.

Managers play a vital role in employee development. Most managers take great pride in helping their employees grow and develop into productive members of the team. However, no employee is perfect. Inevitably there will come a time when a manager has to address some type of performance problem.